Ethics in Engineering Education: Is ABET Enough?

ABET is an organization that accredits college or university programs in STEM and provides quality assurance that a program meets the standards of the field or profession. According to current scholarship, there is concern that ABET accreditation has a negative impact on the transparency of syllabi and student engagement in engineering ethics. This study was designed to understand more about the relationship between ABET accreditation, syllabi design, and engineering ethics by assessing 22 syllabi from an R1 institution’s electrical and computer engineering department. These syllabi were analyzed to understand where they fall in the students’ degree path, learning outcomes, assessment processes, and whether or not they explicitly mentioned ABET. Most notably from this study, 41% of syllabi mentioned ethics, while 23% of syllabi mentioned ABET requirements. Of those that mentioned ABET, two courses were core courses and three were upper-level electives, with only one of the five syllabi mentioning ethics. These findings suggest that when ethics is prioritized in the course, ABET is not made apparent as a goal. When ABET is explicitly mentioned, it is unlikely to see ethics prioritized as well in the course. This is consistent with current scholarship that ethics is treated problematically as an add-on to courses. Future course design should focus on not just technical aspects, but also ethics and transparency around designed course outcomes and assessment. This study’s limitations include a small sample size, and possible selection bias, given that faculty voluntarily chose to participate in this study. Future research involving a larger sample and mixed methods is needed to better understand the relationship between course objectives, ABET, and ethics across engineering.